The future looks dark indeed; and as dark as it looks to a dilettante like me, it must look darker yet to someone who takes the life of the mind as seriously as Paul Gottfried does. How intensely intellectual the Old Right is! If you haven`t read your Aristotle in the original Greek, these guys can sometimes be hard to follow.

In today`s political circumstances they are of course perfectly irrelevant. Is there any case to be made for paleoconservatism as a long-term investment? There is, although the case rests on deeply pessimistic premises.

It may be that the Old Right will come into its inheritance at last twenty or thirty years from now, in one of the little fragment nations that will emerge when corruption, fiscal incompetence, demographic idiocy, educational romanticism, willful scientific ignorance, ethnic warfare, and missionary imperialism have finally destroyed the United States of America.

That will be too late for Paul Gottfried. As a patriot and a champion of America`s founding ideals, he would in any case be too distressed to say "I told you so." The people of that future remnant, though, if they should come across a copy of Encounters in some dusty archive, might well shake their heads in sorrow, murmuring: "Why didn`t anyone listen to these guys?"